'bf babies more intelligent' thread II

Ok, the original thread actually said that bf babies were more intelligent not because of bm but because their mum's were more intelligent...thread was killed by obsessive spamming from one idiot MNer and I would have been happy to let it die except that I clicked on a link on another thread and then came across this article which says that bf for even 4 weeks can have "significant effect on a childs development in primary and secondary school".

Thought it might be an interesting way to reopen the debate given that many posters were saying there was lack of evidence for any intellectual benefits of bf.

Bear in mind that significant is a scientific term. It doesn't mean that your baby will be significantly more intelligent, just that the statistical difference between the babies was big enough. Alos, unless they divide babies into groups randomly (never going to happen) there is no way of proving it. You cna just show it correlates.

Sorry but I know a lot of breast fed kids who are thick as shit. My children were not breast fed and one has almost finished his Maths Degree and already has a 50k a year job to go to, and the youngest is also studying Maths at University starting this year.

I think that if you dont have a basic understanding of stats that can make it harder, because the differences are ones which are observed statistically, rather than by being able to look at a small number of children and see an obvious difference.

Also some people like to look at numbers and some people like to see things with their own eyes, or to take advice based on the experience of friends or family - it would be interesting to see if rates of breastfeeding were different depending on the 'style' of information that people preferred.

I can't remember who said it but the plural of anecdote is not data. If every BF child was 1 IQ point up then it would not give you a Maths degree and a teacher would not notice it. But a researcher might pick it up as significant.

Common sense should really prevail. In the grand scheme of things, I would rather bf than not but, after spending the first two months of ds's life utterly miserable, obsessively trying to make bf work and thinking I was a failure, I began bottle feeding. My crying, distressed and quite frankly far-too-skinny baby turned into a smiling, happy, sleeping little bundle. Looking back I can't believe I was that person.

I'm expecting dc2 and although I will bf again, if it doesn't work out, then I'm not going to beat myself up about it like I did last time.

Both my Dcs were premmies and the hospital they were born in had a milk bank. Both received donated milk. It is expensive stuff. I don't think that the hospital would go to such great lengths to provide such an amazing service if there wasn't a clinically proven benefit (though not necessarily I.Q.)

'Women with a degree are more likely likely to initiate breastfeeding than women in other groups, and by one week women with a degree are twice as likely to be breastfeeding as women in the lowest educational group (93% versus 46%). These differences increase with the age of the baby: at 7 weeks, women with degrees are three times more likely to be breastfeeding than women with the fewest qualifications (82% versus 28%) while after 17 weeks, mothers with degrees are over four times more likely to be breastfeeding."

reallytired, if you look at the study (thanks bubbleymummy) it shows that maternal educational level is a big factor in BFing. I don't know about IQ, though. I shouldn't think maternal IQ increases with BFing. Having a baby appears to have dropped my IQ by about 20 points (lack of sleep).